Legendary British war photographer Don McCullin's 90th birthday last month was commemorated through three significant public events that both celebrated his extraordinary career and revealed the inherent contradictions facing working-class artists under capitalism. The celebrations included a major retrospective titled "A Desecrated Serenity" at Hauser & Wirth in New York, a headline lecture at London's Royal Academy, and an extensive interview published in The Guardian.
Born in 1935 in Finsbury Park, London, McCullin's life and photographic work have been fundamentally shaped by hardship, deep compassion, and an unwavering pursuit of truth. After being evacuated during the London Blitz and forced to leave school at age 15 following his father's death, McCullin became largely self-taught, developing his photographic skills through personal initiative and determination. These formative experiences infused his work with profound emotional depth and a visceral sense of justice. As McCullin once explained, "Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures."
McCullin's entry into professional photography began during his National Service with the Royal Air Force, where he worked in the base darkroom and purchased his first camera, a Rolleicord. Upon returning to London, he photographed a local gang called The Guvnors in a bombed-out building. After a friend encouraged him to submit the image to The Observer, the newspaper published it in 1959, effectively launching his career. "Frankly, I didn't really know anything about photography," McCullin later revealed, "but after that famous picture of the gang was published, I was offered every job in England."
The photographer's major breakthrough came in 1961 with his coverage of the Berlin Wall's construction, which earned him the British Press Award. His powerful images of Checkpoint Charlie and divided families captured the emotional toll of the Cold War with remarkable sensitivity. Three years later, in 1964, McCullin won another award for his first war assignment documenting the Cyprus civil war, revealing his exceptional ability to frame both tension and human vulnerability in conflict zones.
In 1966, McCullin was recruited by The Sunday Times, where he remained for almost two decades. Working under art director David King, a Trotskyist sympathizer, McCullin was given unprecedented freedom to pursue assignments that combined artistic vision with uncompromising social truth. This period coincided with Britain's convulsion by mass strikes, student protests, and broader international radicalization following events like the May-June 1968 general strike in France, the Vietnam War, and uprisings throughout the colonial world.
These tumultuous events culminated in the mass movement spearheaded by the miners' strike that ultimately brought down Edward Heath's Conservative government. The Socialist Labour League, then the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International led by Gerry Healy, understood that the struggle to imbue working-class movements with socialist political consciousness required attention to cultural questions. The organization won support from a significant layer of artists, writers, and filmmakers, helping direct their work toward addressing working-class struggles and revolutionary socialist history.
McCullin was part of this intellectual milieu, with his attraction to socialist ideas reflecting the wider ferment of the era. Photography was understood not as mere documentation but as a means of revealing and indicting imperialism, exploitation, and poverty. Between 1965 and 1970, McCullin covered the Vietnam War, producing some of the most iconic images in photojournalism history. His haunting photograph of a shell-shocked U.S. Marine during the Battle of Hue became emblematic of war's devastating psychological toll.
His international assignments extended beyond Vietnam to include the Congo Crisis and the Nigerian Civil War, where he captured the famine and displacement in Biafra. One particularly harrowing image showed an albino child dying of starvation. Reflecting on these experiences, McCullin later said, "I was ashamed to be part of the human race. Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives."
From 1971 to 1975, McCullin documented the spillover of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos, as well as the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He commented, "Somebody may have been killed by the wayside and his body is rotting away and nobody cares. I care, and I am going to photograph it." His assignments also included the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Arab states. In Uganda under Idi Amin's brutal regime, he was arrested while documenting atrocities and narrowly escaped execution. In 1979, he covered the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Shah installed by the 1953 U.S. and British-backed coup, capturing both the fervor and fear permeating Tehran's streets.
McCullin's domestic British work from the 1960s and 70s, depicting homelessness, slum clearances, coal miners, and industrial decline, remains equally powerful. Portraits such as "Homeless Irishman, Spitalfields" (1969) serve as intimate, unflinching indictments of poverty. "There were many untold truths about this country," he explained in a 1989 BBC documentary. "We had poverty, we had unemployment, we had a class system that wasn't convenient."
His series on homelessness revealed the rise of street sleeping due to austerity measures, mental illness, and hostel closures. "You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery, and death," he explained. "You have to wade through to record them." The early 1980s saw McCullin documenting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, photographing Mujahideen fighters backed by U.S. support, and covering the civil war in El Salvador. He attempted to report on the Falklands War in 1982 but was denied access by the British government, foreshadowing the era of embedded war reporting under strict military control.
During this period, McCullin's editorial support began eroding. Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of The Sunday Times in 1981 was emblematic of the Thatcher-era counter-revolution against the working class, and McCullin was eventually ousted. A friend summarized the new editorial direction: "No more starving third-world babies; more successful businessmen around their weekend barbecues."
In 1982, McCullin documented the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian camp massacres in Lebanon, where Christian Phalangist militias, with Israeli support, killed up to 3,000 civilians. His image of a Palestinian mother in her destroyed home, titled "After the Massacre of Sabra Camp in Beirut," remains one of his most frequently cited works. "I photographed the madness of men who had lost all sense of humanity," he reflected. These assignments marked McCullin's final frontline work.
After this period, McCullin largely withdrew from conflict photography, citing exhaustion and profound disillusionment. In 1984, he confessed, "There is guilt in every direction. That's why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace." He turned to creating haunting landscapes of Somerset, which he called his spiritual home, along with carefully constructed still life images and explorations of Roman ruins across North Africa and the Middle East.
In his recent Guardian interview, McCullin expressed deep pessimism about his legacy, describing his life as "a cesspit" and lamenting that his war photography had done "absolutely no good at all." This despair and conviction that his photographs never changed anything reflects not simply the voice of a man scarred by decades of trauma, but a broader historical context shaped by the betrayal of the working class by Stalinist, social democratic, and trade union bureaucracies.
McCullin's demoralization was shaped by the historical defeats of the working class following the revolutionary optimism of the 1968-75 period, which had created conditions where socialist ideas flourished. His early conviction that photography could shock the conscience and expose injustice was inseparable from this revolutionary atmosphere. However, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a decisive historical shift in the labor movement, marked by renunciationism among social democratic parties.
Labour in Britain under Tony Blair renounced its reformist Clause IV commitment to public ownership and openly embraced market economics. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet bureaucracy renounced even verbal allegiance to the October Revolution and undertook capitalism's restoration and the Soviet Union's liquidation. Academic imperialist apologist Francis Fukuyama declared the "End of History," proclaiming liberal democracy and free-market capitalism as the final, universal form of human government. Trade unions became wholly integrated into corporate management as policemen of the working class, abandoning any defense of wages, jobs, or welfare.
The demoralization of artists and intellectuals like McCullin reflected this collapse of the old labor movement. They were ill-equipped to understand the root causes or recognize the need to construct a genuinely revolutionary alternative. This sense of futility deepened as photography became incorporated into an art market serving as another playground for the super-rich. Nearly one-third of global billionaires hold art collections averaging $300 million each, and McCullin's own photographs now sell for substantial sums, with his shell-shocked U.S. Marine image recently fetching nearly $32,000 at auction.
However, McCullin's conclusion that his work never changed anything is fundamentally false. His images of poverty, war, and imperialist slaughter were born from his Finsbury Park origins, from deprivation and struggle, from a Britain where workers fought for their dignity. His war photography was not passive documentation but a powerful indictment of capitalism. Millions were educated through his lens, with his Vietnam photographs galvanizing anti-war sentiment, his homelessness documentation exposing enduring class divisions, and his images from Biafra, Beirut, and Northern Ireland forcing millions to confront the brutality of colonialism and capitalist warfare.
What happened subsequently was not the failure of his art, but of political parties and programs that rejected and opposed developing revolutionary struggle against capitalism. The task today is to reconnect art with revolution. In that struggle, unfolding amid an unprecedented global crisis and the political collapse of old Stalinist and social democratic parties, McCullin's photographs still provide a searing indictment of a system that must be overthrown.
